The present invention relates to a sample repairing apparatus and a sample repairing method for repairing a defect with high accuracy in a sample, such as a mask, used in the production of a device or the like having a line width equal to or less than 0.1 μm, and further to a device manufacturing method using such a sample repairing method.
There has been a known method in the prior art, in which a sample, such as a mask, is irradiated with a finely focused electron beam and then a reactive gas is blown to the irradiated region thereof with a nozzle so as to carry out the etching of the sample.
When the mask subject to the repairing has the minimum line width as narrow as about 90 nm, the edge roughness in the repaired pattern should be controlled to be of the order of some ten nm or less, which in turn requires to focus the beam to be half a size of the required roughness or smaller than that. On the other hand, from the reason that the electron beam, if having a higher landing energy, could cause a back scattering after an incidence upon the sample and the reflected beam thereof could emit secondary electrons to contribute to the etching, there is another problem that a precision of processing would be not greater than that limited by the extent of the back scattered electrons.
Besides, it has been a main stream to use an ion beam for repairing the mask in the prior art. The repairing apparatus employing the focused ion beam has a problem that an ion implantation to a mask substrate or a damage from an irradiation beam could deteriorate a transmittance in a silica substrate, substantially inhibiting the repair of opaque defect from being carried out, which is considered to be a serious problem especially in the F2 lithography.
REFERENCE
[Non-Patent Document]
A set of advance copies from the NEXT GENERATION LITHOGRAPHY WORKSHOP (NGL2003), Jul. 10 and 11, 2003, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, “Next generation Electron Beam mask repair tool”, Dr. Jayant Neogi, Johannes Bihr and Klaus Edinger, hosted by: Silicon Technology Subcommittee, Next Generation Lithography Technology Workshop, Japan Society of Applied Physics, co-hosted by: No. 132 committee, “Industrial Application of Charged Particle Beam”, Japan Society of the Promotion of Science.